Do it.... I'm sure it'd be great for the rebranding. Throw in a government shutdown over (formerly Republican proposal) Obamacare for good measure.

Quote:

As an assignment for the magazine here, I recently spent a couple of months marinating on the events of 1998, when we saw only the second impeachment of a president in the history of the Republic, which came about mainly because the Republican party refused to recognize the legitimacy of a Democratic president, and because that same party had the votes in the House of Representative to bring the action forward, which it did, in a lame duck session, after the country had told the Republicans in no uncertain terms through that year's midterm elections that they should knock this shit off. Also, because the president was incomprehensibly reckless in his personal life, but that was a minor factor. I found myself astonished all over again at the sheer vandalism of the whole project, at the heedless damage the Republicans did to the country because they quite simply couldn't stop themselves, nor did they particularly want to do so. By 2000, it should be noted, nobody at that year's Republican convention even mentioned the impeachment of the president, let alone bragged about it. All that high-flown -- and incredibly bogus -- rhetoric about defending the Rule Of Law, and all those quotations from Robert Bolt's Thomas More, all of it went right down to the darkest depths of the memory hole.

Until now.

"I think those are serious things, but we're in serious times," Coburn said in Muskogee, Okla., when asked about impeachment. "And I don't have the legal background to know if that rises to ‘high crimes and misdemeanors,' but I think you're getting perilously close."

Remember, this isn't some back-bench featherhead bruiting this about. It's a (mysteriously) respected senator with whom the president is purportedly close friends. (Don't be fooled. The only reason Coburn isn't reckoned to be among the crunchiest nuts on the senatorial tree is that he shares the Oklahoma delegation with Jim Inhofe, who makes Coburn look like Pericles.) Coburn is going to get asked on the news programs to talk about what he said. This talk is now undeniably mainstreamed. OK, boys.

Bring it on.

This president isn't going to make it easier on you. There isn't going to be a personal scandal that you can gin up this time. I think you should proceed to hearings -- all of you fine old white people -- wherein you try to remove from office the first African American president in history for the high crimes of getting a law passed that you don't like. I think you should recall how everything except the Lewinsky stuff fell apart on Ken Starr, and then trot out the IRS and Benghazi, Benghazi! BENGHAZI! again on national television. I think this is a monumental political winner for your party. I think this may just lock things up for you the next 20 years. Go ahead. Give your slavering base what it really wants.

(You'll also note from the Tulsa newspaper that Coburn also called for a new constitutional convention -- aka The Second Worst Idea In Politics. Why you're hearing about it again now is that the delegates to The Second Worst Idea would be chosen by the various state legislatures where, at the moment, Republicans are running amok. The reason this is The Second Worst Idea is that the last time we did it, we threw out the entire system of government, and that was with James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and George Washington running the show. I'm no raging Founder-phile, but that seems to me to be a better lineup than handing the job over to Tom Coburn, Mark Levin, and the inhabitants of monkeyhouses like the current Wisconsin and North Carolina state legislatures. Last time, we did it partly because of Shays Rebellion. This time, we'll do it because conservatives got beat on health-care with their own ideas.)

This should be the final put-up-or-shut-up moment. Either the party distances itself from this kind of loose talk, or it owns this kind of loose talk. This isn't something that ought to be thrown out there just to rev up the base for the midterms. As we learned in 1998, this kind of thing takes on a life of its own, and it's difficult to turn off once you engage it. Either the party reins in its base, and the people playing so loudly to it, like Tom Coburn, or it embraces the base as the ideological heart of the party. You can't middle this stuff any more. The stakes are too high.

I was obviously leaving off Presidents who actually were impeached. Jesus guys.

EDIT: As FD pointed out, my bad, Nixon wasn't impeached but resigned before impeachment, regardless, my post was aimed at Presidents who deserved censure but didn't receive it. Other than Harding (oops forgot him)Obama is easily one of the most impeachable Presidents... it amazes me how far the left goes to ignore what are clearly illegal acts.

Bush lied us into the Iraq war. Lyndon Johnson lied about the Tompkin incident that escalated the Vietnam war. Reagan sold arms to our enemies that were used to kill our friends. He then used the profits to fund terrorists/insurgents for political reasons. Clinton lied to a grand jury.

Thats a pretty high bar to clear for impeachment.

Nothing LBJ, Bush or Reagen did comes remotely close to the illegal expansion of executive powers under Obama. I'm not excusing those previous bad acts but what Obama is doing is far far worse. Obama's lawless executive will do far more damage over a very long time to come.

The list of presidents meriting impeachment in the last 100 year begins and ends with Nixon, Clinton and Harding.

imo omitting the truth is the same as a lie -- reagan needs to be on that list and so does the bush cartel -- one for lying about planting drugs on a kid and then getting on tv and making shit up and the other for disobeying the USC during several mil opps.

Scandal after scandal, coupled with an ongoing contempt for the law and the Constitution, demonstrated by high-level officials and the president himself, point to one deeply troubling conclusion: the Obama administration may be the most corrupt administration ever inflicted on the American public. And while the mainstream media have done a remarkable job deflecting much of that reality, even they cannot keep up with the avalanche of disturbing revelations that arise, seemingly on a daily basis.

We begin with yet another report about the Fast and Furious gunrunning operation, courtesy of Sharyl Attkisson, one of the few remaining reporters who follows a story wherever it goes. Last Wednesday, three more F&F weapons turned up at crime scenes in Mexico. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry and as many as 300 Mexican nationals, including teens at a birthday party, were slaughtered by those weapons. Yet the ensuing investigation was first thwarted by Eric Holder’s refusal to turn over critical documents to congressional investigators, earning him a contempt of Congress citation. It was followed by President Obama invoking executive privilege to prevent the same. Other documents reveal that Eric Holder lied to Congress about when he first heard about the operation. The House Oversight Committee is currently suing for release of the material, but both Holder and Obama remain unscathed by this deadly debacle, even as the Terry family’s effort to find out what really happened to their son has been ignored.

Holder’s duplicity regarding Fast and Furious is hardly an anomaly. On March 1, 2011, Holder told Congress that ”decisions made in the New Black Panther Party (NBPP) case were made by career attorneys in the department.” It was subsequently revealed that an Obama appointee, Associate A.G. Thomas Perrelli, overruled a unanimous decision by DOJ attorneys who favored prosecuting NBPP members seen on videotape attempting to intimidate voters outside a Philadelphia polling station during the 2008 election.

Holder also “misled” Congress last June. “With regard to the potential prosecution of the press for the disclosure of material: that is not something I’ve ever been involved in, heard of or would think would be wise policy,” he said. Yet it was subsequently revealed that Holder personally signed off on a warrant to investigate Fox New reporter James Rosen, allowing the DOJ to search Rosen’s email and phone records, as well as those of his family members.

The DOJ also secretly seized the phone records of AP reporters and editors, claiming they only did so after making “every reasonable effort to obtain information through alternative means.” The timing of the investigation suggested the DOJ was looking into who leaked classified information about a plot to disrupt a second underwear bomber from blowing up a jetliner in Yemen. According to the New York Times, that was one of two leaks Holder was investigating “after a spate of disclosures about the bomb plot, cyberwarfare against Iran, Mr. Obama’s procedures for putting terrorism suspects on a ‘kill list,’ and the raid that killed Osama bin Laden.”

On Monday, the Washington Times offered the DOJ a big assist with regard to that second leak, revealing that “scores of State Department emails” show the Obama administration itself granted Times reporter David E. Sanger access to a series of high-level administration officials. Sanger then wrote a book about the American-Israeli effort to sabotage Iranian nuclear centrifuges with the Stuxnet virus.

As for the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, none other than Vice President Joe Biden revealed the involvement of SEAL Team 6 in that operation. Congress has announced an investigation into the subsequent deaths of 22 SEALs whose helicopter was shot down in Afghanistan in 2011. Part of that investigation will likely include the possibility that Biden’s shameless promotion of administration “toughness” may have made those SEALs targets. Additionally, misleading information provided by the Defense Department to family members of the slain SEALs indicates this scandal may be even bigger than Benghazi.

The ongoing investigation of the IRS’s targeting of conservative groups, which has expanded from “rogue agents” in Cincinnati all the way up to IRS Chief Counsel–one of two agency members appointed by the president–now enters its third month. It has also expanded beyond the IRS, as a series of previously undisclosed emails indicate the Federal Election Commission (FEC) may have been given taxpayer information in violation of federal law and the IRS regulations. Earlier this month House House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA) announced he would subpoena IRS documents, because the agency was stonewalling investigators’ requests, exactly as the DOJ did in the Fast and Furious scandal.

With regard to these scandals and others, the administration’s water-carriers in the media, as well as the president himself, have attempted to dismiss them as “phony” or “unnecessary distractions.” This “what difference at this point does it make” attitude, exemplified by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, is part of a well-established strategy by an administration convinced the attention span of the public can be undermined by both the volume of scandals, and the time it takes to unravel each one. Thus, for example, the Washington Post’s August 15 revelation that the NSA “has broken privacy rules or overstepped its legal authority thousands of times each year since Congress granted the agency broad new powers in 2008″ overshadows the IRS scandal, which overshadows Navy SEAL scandal, which overshadows the Benghazi scandal, which overshadows Fast and Furious–all of which have been dismissed at one time or another as partisan witch hunts.

Yet even if one were to completely concede such a deplorable assertion, there is still no question whatsoever that administration officials have trampled on both the rule of law and the Constitution. Perhaps the most contemptible effort in that regard is President Obama’s transparently unconstitutional effort to suspend various parts of the Affordable Healthcare Act. How Americans feel about that piece of legislation is irrelevant. What’s relevant is that Congress passed the law, including the part that calls for its implementation beginning on Jan. 1, 2014, and the president signed it. There is no Constitutional way the president can simply choose to ignore sections of a law he doesn’t like, or go around Congress completely when they won’t kowtow to his agenda.

Yet that’s precisely what Obama and other administration officials have done. In 2012, the president unilaterally decreed that the same DREAM Act rejected by Congress 18 months earlier would be implemented for the children of illegal aliens. He also gutted part of the Welfare Reform Act of 1996, in clear violation of the statute. Obama is still ignoring a ruling by the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals and federal appeals courts in D.C. and Philadelphia, all of whom ruled his “recess” appointments to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) were unconstitutional.

And while the contempt for the law starts at the top, it is by no means limited to the president himself. On August 12, Eric Holder ordered his attorneys to stop seeking mandatory sentences in low-level drug cases, by deliberately withholding evidence regarding the amount of drugs involved. Holder is also suing the state of Texas to pre-clear its latest election law, in complete defiance of the recent Supreme Court ruling that stated Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act is “unconstitutional” and that “the formula can no longer be used as a basis for subjecting jurisdiction to preclearance.” He is also pursuing civil rights violations against George Zimmerman, absent a shred of evidence for doing so.

Treasury Secretary Jack Lew is also demonstrating contempt for the law. A Daily Treasury Statement dated July 26 revealed the federal debt had remained at approximately $16.7 trillion for 70 straight days, despite the reality that the federal deficit rose by $98 billion in July. If the debt had continued to increase, it would have topped the debt limit imposed by Congress. Lew characterizes his effort to circumvent Congress as “extraordinary measures.” Yet any American company engaging in similarly “extraordinary” accounting procedures would be targeted for prosecution.

Newly appointed EPA head Gina McCarthy is also comfortable bypassing the Legislative Branch of government. McCarthy announced on August 14 that the EPA will unilaterally enact rules to combat global warming, despite the reality that a bill to establish a cap-and-trade system was rejected by Congress in 2009–when Democrats controlled both chambers of Congress.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is being investigated by Congress for soliciting donations from health organizations to promote Obamacare. In May, Senator Lamar Alexander (R-TN) explained that such an effort might be yet another attempt to bypass Congress. “If she is raising money from private entities and coordinating with those entities to do something that Congress has refused to do, the Constitution doesn’t allow that and federal law makes it a criminal violation,” he told National Review.

Congress may have trouble getting to the truth. According to an Associated Press story published in June, Sebelius and a number of other administration officials have been using ”secret government email accounts they say are necessary to prevent their inboxes from being overwhelmed with unwanted messages.” Yet the AP further notes that, despite filing a Freedom of Information Act three months earlier, most agencies have failed to turn over such information, and that the Labor Department demanded more than $1 million for the account names. The AP pursued the story after it was discovered that former EPA head Lisa Jackson was conducting official business using a secret email account under the alias “Richard Windsor.”

And lest anyone think the practice may have been discontinued, the House Oversight Committee last Tuesday requested that IRS official Lois Lerner turn over emails sent to, or from, her personal “msn.com” account. “Through the course of the investigation, we have learned that you sent documents related to your official duties from your official IRS e-mail account to an msn.com e-mail account labeled ‘Lois Home,’” a letter sent to Lerner states. “This raises some serious questions concerning your use of a non-official e-mail account to conduct official business.”

So much for the self-professed “most transparent administration in history.”

All of the above suggests the Obama administration is guided by one over-riding imperative: we’ll do whatever we want, and we dare someone to stop us. Since the media are more a part of the problem than the solution, that burden falls on the Judicial Branch of government, or the Republican Party. As mentioned above, Eric Holder is already ignoring a Supreme Court ruling regarding voting rights, and Obama will ignore the ruling on his illegal NLRB appointees until the Supreme Court hears the case next term.

As for Republicans, investigations into the numerous administration scandals is ongoing, but best described as plodding. This is due in large part to the sheer volume of dubious activity they are tasked with investigating. But their reticence in certain areas, most notably House Speaker John Boehner’s (R-OH) refusal to appoint a Select Committee to investigate Benghazi, despite pressure from fellow Republicans, is deeply disturbing.

Yet their calculatingly reticent reaction to the president’s determination to ignore the law is beyond the pale. Perhaps the best encapsulation of the party’s unbearably pusillanimous attitude was expressed last week by Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) with regard to so-called comprehensive immigration reform. ”I believe that this president will be tempted, if nothing happens in Congress, he will be tempted to issue an executive order as he did for the DREAM Act kids a year ago, where he basically legalizes 11 million people by the sign of a pen,” Rubio said in an interview last Tuesday.

In other words, give Obama what he wants because he’ll take it anyway. It is precisely this kind of capitulation that has millions of Americans wondering if there is anything Republicans will do to throttle any aspect of this administration’s illegal behavior. It is not an exaggeration to say the fate of the nation may depend on the answer to that question.

But there IS no need for re-branding now. Obama's poll numbers are in the tank, he doesn't control Congress, most pundits are predicing the GOP will do very well in the '14 Senate races, and his biggest drop in support is now coming from young voters.

So there's no need for teh GOP to re-boot. Just let this assclown continue to embarrass himself and cry about "racism" and "uncooperative Republicans" as he continues to make excuses.

__________________"My glutes are shutting off. So I tried to activate my glutes as best I could in between, but they never stayed activated." - Tiger Woods 2/5/15

Obama was the leader we thought he was...and in all honesty his leadership hasn't been too bad. It's just his awful agenda. The DOJ is a train wreck. His foreign policy is awful and his domestic policy, while well intentioned, is going to hurt us for a long time.

Obama was the leader we thought he was...and in all honesty his leadership hasn't been too bad. It's just his awful agenda. The DOJ is a train wreck. His foreign policy is awful and his domestic policy, while well intentioned, is going to hurt us for a long time.

I have to take issue with the bolded part. Could you give me a few examples of Obama successfully leading something (even if it's the wrong agenda)? More often than not, he let's others who may share his values lead. For example, with the Porkulus and Obamacare legislative initiatives, he more or less checked out and let Reid and Pelosi lead the way. In Libya, our European allies led. In Syria, his Islamist buddy from Turkey, Ergodan, took the lead.

I suppose we could say he lead us out of Iraq (after his negotiators failed to work out a status of force agreement) and is leading us out of Afghanistan (despite the lack of lasting success on the ground).

__________________

"I'll see you guys in New York." ISIS Caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi to US military personnel upon his release from US custody at Camp Bucca in Iraq during Obama's first year in office.

I have to take issue with the bolded part. Could you give me a few examples of Obama successfully leading something (even if it's the wrong agenda)? More often than not, he let's others who may share his values lead. For example, with the Porkulus and Obamacare legislative initiatives, he more or less checked out and let Reid and Pelosi lead the way. In Libya, our European allies led. In Syria, his Islamist buddy from Turkey, Ergodan, took the lead.

I suppose we could say he lead us out of Iraq (after his negotiators failed to work out a status of force agreement) and is leading us out of Afghanistan (despite the lack of lasting success on the ground).

I think some of his social commentary has been good. I thought the "Beer Summit" during his first good was a good idea. I think his comments and EO's, minus the ACA one, around Sandy Hook was good. I thought his comments around the Zimmerman Verdict were good, but he did step in it with his intial comments. His foreign policy has been absolutely terrible, though. Under Bush I though I had a good handle on what were trying to accomplish. Under Obama I don't know if we're coming or going.